Has it been two weeks already?! I guess time flies when you're doin' science.

Anyway, here is our continuing effort to bring Gridcoin to the Medium audience. We have a series of articles planned for release every fortnight. This post is titled, "The Gridcoin Ecosystem and Resources." Below, you will find the link to the article along with the text. If you have a Medium account, give us a clap and a follow to help increase our visibility. We hope you enjoy! Feedback is always welcome.

The Gridcoin Ecosystem and Resources

The Gridcoin network is an evolving ecosystem. In its current state it is comprised mainly of data-based projects, crunchers, stakers, and community participants.

Data-Based Projects

Data-based projects are projects which provide data for the Gridcoin network to crunch. Currently, these projects are hosted on the BOINC software. In the future, projects hosted outside of BOINC may be added to the ecosystem.

Projects are brought into the Gridcoin network through the Gridcoin whitelist, which is a list of projects approved by network participants. To be added to the whitelist, a project must convince network participants of its value and pass a blockchain vote. This processes has been expanded on and defined in a proposal currently up for a vote. The proposal can be found here.

Projects are removed from the Gridcoin whitelist through the same process of blockchain voting, though a proposal to further define this process is currently in development. This proposed process can be found here.

As of this posting, the complete whitelist consists of 27 data-based projects, listed below with their brief descriptions. The maintained list can be found here.

Projects

ODLK1 - OLDK is building a database of canonical forms of diagonal Latin squares of the 10th order.

Sourcefinder - Sourcefinder is about testing the performance and quality of the Duchamp Sourcefinding application. Hosted by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a joint venture of Curtin University and The University of Western Australia

[email protected] - Lattice sieving step in Number Field Sieve factorization of large integers. Hosted by the California State University Fullerton.

[email protected] Research in number theory. Number theorists can mine the data for interesting patterns to help them formulate conjectures about number fields. Hosted by the Arizona State University, school of Mathematics.

[email protected] - Protein structure prediction. Hosted by the University of Washington

SRBase - Attempting to solve Sierpinski / Riesel Bases up to 1030. The project is in collaboration with the Mersenne CRUS project.

theSkyNet POGS - Astronomy Research. A joint venture of Curtin University and The University of Western Australia

TN-Grid - The [email protected] project is an implementation of the PC-IM algorithm, whose purpose is to expand Gene Regulatory Networks (GRN). Hosted by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR)

Crunchers

Gridcoin crunchers are network participants who direct their processing power to data-based projects. They are rewarded for their participation with GRC which is distributed using the magnitude mechanism. In its current state, a protocol defined magnitude kitty is split equally between each data-based project. A cruncher is then given an individual magnitude based on their relative contribution to the data-based projects. Such a model builds a magnitude economy which encourages a flatter distribution of processing power, which in turn helps ensure projects get their work completed regardless of their immediate perceived value among network participants.

Stakers

Gridcoin stakers are network participants with substantial balances of GRC who provide network security by staking blocks for the Gridcoin blockchain through the proof-of-stake protocol. There is no required balance of GRC to stake a block, however proof-of-stake by definition makes a participant with a higher balance more likely to stake a block than a participant with a lower balance. Stakers are rewarded for their participation with transaction fees, though a new reward mechanism is currently being explored. An introduction to this proposal can be found here.

Community

Gridcoin is an open-source network. Its community is comprised primarily of volunteers, though developers are reimbursed for their work from the Gridcoin Foundation. In general, open-source communities maintain tasks related to: development, graphic design, analysis, documentation, copywriting, translation, and outreach, marketing, and organization.

These tasks are completed by the Gridcoin community, which is comprised of blockchain purists, enthusiasts, and coders, established scientific researchers, commercial researchers, institutional researchers, Ph.D candidates, undergraduates, citizen scientists, data analysts, makers and tinkerers, and individuals and groups of all backgrounds. Every participant and developer seeks to advance science, research, and data analysis through blockchain technology, incentive mechanisms, value systems, or by participating in a distributed computing network.

If you or someone you know would like to get involved with building and maintaining the Gridcoin network and its ecosystem, feel free to reach out using any of the resources listed below.